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THE DE LAVAL SEPARATOR CO 

General Offices: 

74 Cortlandt Street, 

New York. 



Randolph .^CanalSts. 
CHICAGO. 

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PHILADELPHIA. 



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WINNIPEG. 



THE MENACE OF THE ARID LANDS. 



A BLESSING TURNED INTO A CURSE. 



The immensity of the products of our American agriculture, especially when 
expressed in terms of money value, has been this fall a favorite theme for a great 
number of writers in periodicals that do not generally concern themselves particularly 
with rural topics. The text, expressed or implied, is commonly a little table con- 
solidated from reports of the national Department of Agriculture, which makes the 
corn yield of the present year 2,650,000,000 bushels, worth $1,060,000,000; the wheat 
yield 650,000,000 bushels, worth ^'455,000,000, and the oat yield 935,000,000 bushels, 
worth $280,500,000, a grand total for the three crops of 4,235,000,000 bushels, bringing 
to the producers the colossal sum of $1,795,500,000. Nearly two billion dollars divided 
among the farmers of the United States! Who wouldn't be an American farmer? 
If anybody is on the highway to wealth, surely he is the man, and no mistake. Such 
is the general impression that can hardly fail to be received by the ordinary reader 
of the ordinary newspaper or magazine article on the agricultural history of the 
present year. 

Occasionally, to be sure, it occurs to one of these hurrah writers to do a little 
further calculation, generally in a footnote, or at any rate inconspicuously, and as 
if the final results, which do not appear to come out quite as expected, must be sus- 
ceptible of some explanation and could be of no great consequence anyway. One 
such glorifier of our tremendous agricultural prosperity computes that if the value 
of the three great cereal crops were distributed evenly among the families engaged 
in raising them, each family would receive — each family, mind you, each whole fam- 
ily — about $180. One hundred and eighty dollars for a family as its gross return, 
not by any means net profit, for the grain marketed by its working members during 
a year of enormous abundance! 

I was talking not long ago with a man of considerable means, not acquired in 
agriculture, but a real farmer and the descendant of generations of farmers, occupy- 
ing ancestral fields of large dimensions in one of the most productive regions of 
New York, fields that have always been carefully tilled and abundantly fertilized, 



with due attention to rotation and to the selling of finished products, and he said. 
" The fact of it is, the drift of things in this country is steadily reducing our farmers 
to the condition of the peasantry of the old nations of Europe, a condition in which 
sustenance, of a very plain sort, may reasonably be expected, but in which there is 
positively no hope for anything better than unceasing toil, no opportunity whatever 
of accumulating even the most modest competence." Another man, joining in the 
conversation, said: " Yes; and have you noticed the great number of advertisements 
in the Country Gentleman of farmers who want situations as managers on gentlemen'; 
places, and of gentlemen who want farmers. to operate their places? The farmers 
are becoming quite a distinct class from the gentlemen. That is most strikingly a 
fcatuie of our own times. Our grandfathers, our fathers even, if they were Amer- 
icans, would have regarded such a distinction as that as hardly conceivable in this 
country." 

These gentlemen put the case pretty strongly, but no one who takes a broad 
survey of all the facts will deny that they have some colorable sanction for their view, 
and the computation of the newspaper writer who would give the farm families of 
the country a gross return of $180 each family from our principal cereals, forms a 
kind of bridge by which one may pass back and forth between the consideration of 
the stupendous aggregate value of the products of our farms and the consideration 
of the real financial condition and, above all, the hopes for the near future, of the 
farmers themselves. Taking both groups of facts into view, the idea will gradually 
dawi, upon the mind of any one who will take the trouble to give the matter even 
cursory and superficial examination, that the vast development of our national con- 
tributions to the sustenance of the world has no necessary relation whatever to the 
wellare of the men who raise the crops. American agriculture may flourish like 
a green bay tree while the American farmer receives, on the whole, and as compared 
with other classes of the community, a pitiably meager return in the way of com- 
pensation for his labor, interest on his capital and reward for his special services to 
mankind. 

It is to the failure to notice the very simple and, when one thinks of it, per 
fectly manifest fact just mentioned that is due, more than to all other causes put 
together, the permitted existence in the body politic of whatever evils environ, un- 
necessarily and unjustly, the farmer's lot. We have thought far too much about 
developing our agriculture, far too little about improving the condition of our agri- 
culturists. We have acted blindly, as blind nature acts, for the increase of the species, 
with little or no regard to the fate of the individual. There is no single plant, no 
single insect, no single microbe, that one man alone may not easily destroy. There 
is no species of plants or of insects or of microbes that all mankind acting together 
could readily annihilate. For the protection, the continuation, the multiplication 
of the species, nature has provided by a thousand devices of infinite ingenuity, 
against which the attacks of whatever enemies may arise are generally doomed to 
spend themselves in failure. For the welfare of the individual nature cares nothing 
at all. 



Just so with the American public as it expresses itself through great lin< 
national policy. Every American has a more or less clearly conceived apprehen ion 
ol the fact that all our prosperity rests upon our agriculture, and is, therefoi 
certain to understand, if he thinks about the matter at all, that our agriculture ought 
to be fostered; but that is as far as the average American goes !. never occurs 
to most people for an instant that it is quite possible to foster our agriculture by 
methods that will certainly degrade our agriculturists, and that in doubling 
volume of the agricultural products of the country at large we may, if we go a1 
the doubling process in certain ways, really divide by two the nel returns for tl 
products as they come into the possession of the individual farmer. 

It is natural, as has been said, to think in the fashion referred to, because it is 
in this way that nature works. It is natural also, so far as this country is concerned, 
for another reason. Time was, and not so very long ago in the life of the nation, 
when no distinction could be drawn, in the United States at least, between the pros- 
perity of farming and the prosperity of the farmers. The first was then, as now, 
absolutely necessary, and the second went with it inevitably and as matter of course,' 
and we inherit a certain inability to perceive that the two are not necessarily one! 
The idea of developing our agriculture, letting our agriculturists take care of them- 
selves, has become, by heredity, and in the absence of reflection on the changing 
circumstances of changing times, one of the most firmly fixed notions that have taken 
possession of the American mind. It is on a par with the common American craze 
for increasing the population of the country, and, indeed, is much the same thing. 
The more people we have and the more cereals we raise, the better off must we 
certainly be-such is the ordinary belief, and it is not at all to be wondered at. 
The facts of the genesis of the notion are these: 

From the time of the first European settlements on these shores down to a 
period almost within the memory of men now living, it was not only taken for 
granted on all sides, but really was indisputable truth, that every foot of extension 
of the civilized occupation of this country back into the wild interior, every increase 
in population not positively vicious, was in many ways a real and solid gain to the 
people of the American colonies and of the young United States. Occupying a, 
our forefathers did but a narrow strip of land along the Atlantic coast, with only 
inchoate manufactures, very slow and uncertain communication between different 
sections, and agriculture not much more than adequate to provide for very modest 
living, the one thing that was needed before all others was development of the nation 
The father of a large family of stalwart sons and daughters was most distinctly a 
public benefactor. As the children moved westward, bringing into cultivation acre 
after acre of new sod, and thus supplying better and better the needs of a growing 
population and enlarging the material resources of the common stock they wer 
laying broad and deep the foundations of the future greatness of the nation and 
every pioneer deserved a godspeed from all well wishers for mankind. If any cen- 
tral authority had exercised, say a century ago, effective control over the unoccupied 



land* that stretched off, seemingly without limit, to the west, it could not possibly 
have, done a better thing for all concerned than to facilitate by every means within 
its power, including national irrigation, if that had been then possible and necessary, 
the taking up of these lands as fast as might be by anybody who could be induced 
to occupy and cultivate them. Pioneering and homesteading were philanthropic 
occupations of the very first order of necessity and merit. 

But it should never be forgotten — it very often is forgotten — that the circum- 
stances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in this country were radically 
different from those that surround us here in the twentieth; and that many lines of 
public policy once eminently laudable have become obnoxious and dangerous as 
times change. When a baby weighs ten pounds, it has just one alternative before 

it o-row, or die; when in after years the ten pounds have become two hundred, the 

condition of affairs is changed; further increase is suggestive rather of dropsy than 
of growth. The behavior most suitable to the infant nation, just stretching its 
unformed limbs and not yet quite certain what sort of creature it will grow to be, 
becomes in the highest degree absurd when maturity has been attained, and the 
former infant has reached the understanding and enjoyment of the powers of man- 
hood. Of this obvious fact, in its obvious relation to a rational management of 
the public domain, and especially to all plans of whatever name or nature for bring- 
ing into cultivable condition at the public cost the vast territory now lying arid, 
sight has largely and most unfortunately been lost by the American people. We go 
on hurrahing for every increase that successive censuses reveal in our population, 
with very little consideration of the prosperity of the people that have been added — 
in our agricultural area, with very little consideration* of its actual value to the 
nation — and above all, in our production of crops, without any consideration at all 
of the profit of growing them, or the real financial progress of the men who are 
feeding half the world. The irrigation party of the far west is only a symptom and 
a manifestation of that old notion, once true and still powerful, a generation or 
more after it has ceased to fit the times, that the accommodation within our borders 
of as many people as possible is the great national desiderandum. 

Now, in point of fact, the ideal of the irrigationists, which I understand to 
be the making of the United States support as large a population as its territory can 
be made to feed, is just about the very lowest and most unworthy ambition that a 
greai nation can set before its eyes. If swarming millions, cultivating every square 
foot of ground that can be irrigated or otherwise coaxed into producing food plants, 
make a nation great, then is the condition of native India most glorious; then does 
China furnish a nearly perfect model for the imitation of the United States. 

My own view is radically different.' It seems to me that it is not nearly so much 
the increase of our people as the happiness of our people that we should think about 
and labor to promote. Now the happiness of a nation, like the happiness of a fam 
ily, does not depend entirely on its being numerous. It may be said, rather, to rest 
upon a tripod. The first column, absolutely indispensable, is character, including 



of course mental development, genera! education, appreciation of tlie advanta 
of law and order, all that is included in the term civilization. The second column, 
absolutely indispensable also, is the preservation of the public health, a general 
enforcement of hygienic law, the exclusion by quarantine of exotic diseases, and 
the prompt suppression of domestic epidemics. The third column, absolutely indis- 

.ible like the others, is well-distributed financial prosperity. The very founda- 
tions of this third column, so far as the farmers of the land are concerned, — and it 
should never be forgotten that their prosperity is the underlying support of the 
prosperity of all the rest, the mudsill of our national structure, if you like to put 
it so,— have been for long years undergoing a process of attack by the operation 
of our public land system in general; and the irrigation project, as developed in the 
unwise, unpatriotic and unjust law passed by the last congress, threatens to complete 
the work of destruction, and reduce the. condition of the men who have bought 
larnis and paid for them, as the gentleman whom I have quoted said, to that of the 
humblest peasantry of Europe. 

Let us consider for a moment, if you please, the operation of our public land 
system as it has worked in recent years, even without the assistance of the irrigation 
feature, in relation to the financial prosperity of the Americans who own and operate 
farms. The whole matter may be summed up in a nutshell by saying that these 
men have been subjected for a generation or more to a competition by the national 
government that has been little short of ruinous. The average rate of alienation 
of our public lands for the last decade has been nearly 11,500,000 acres per annum, 
which is approximately a million acres per month, over 31,000 acres per day, about 
1,300 acres per hour, or say one acre every three seconds, day and night, Sundays 
and holidays all included. Imagine yourselves standing at the boundary, if there 
were such a boundary, between the land now the property of individuals and that 
which still belongs to the nation at large, and seeing that boundary moving before 
your eyes into the government possessions at such a rate of speed that the latter 
were steadily shrinking, day after day, year after year, at the rate of 21 acres per 
minute. Such is the insane haste with which we have thrown this property into 
market, offering it practically for nothing to anybody and everybody who will take 
it. The return that the government receives from the average of its land parted 
with has been lately about 20 cents per acre above the cost of marketing it. What 
lias been the effect on the prosperity of established farmers? 

In the first place, of course, one thinks naturally of the competition of the new 
farms, in the markets of the world. I am inclined myself to the opinion that the 
injury in this direction is rather less than might be supposed, and thai it is in fact 
very far from being the darkest element of the problem. The growth of population 
must of itself take care of the increased production, in part. The new farmers need 
an infinity of things that they cannot possibly produce. That helps manufactures; 
manufactures require workmen; workmen must eat; and thus the established farmers 
of the older regions will find a certain increase in the demand for their products, mak- 



ing up, in part, for the new supply thrown upon the market by their multiplying com- 
petitors. And then again, the price of breadstuffs is very largely governed by the 
yield of crops abroad and the occurrences of every kind that take place in foreign 
countries. Wheat may bring a high price, though the American crop be immense; it 
may go begging, though our fields yield the scantiest return. Still, of course, it is 
patent that on the whole every new state in an agricultural region, every district 
brought from aridity into cultivation by irrigation, will for a long time export a con- 
siderable surplus of food-stuffs of some sort, and thus act distinctly to a certain extent 
in bearing down the market price. But that is only the beginning. 

A second channel of mischief is the absorption by the new lands of the men 
and women who ought to supply, and in the normal condition of things would sup- 
ply, an abundance of labor, at moderate wages, for established farmers. The demand 
for really efficient farm help, at prices that farmers can afford to pay, is left largely 
unsatisfied, to the injury of the farming interest, and perhaps most of all to the over- 
burdening of the wife of the small farmer with tasks of which hired servants should 
greatly relieve her— by the facility with which the persons who ought to supply it 
can go west and become farmers on their own account, your property and mine 
being freely offered them for that purpose. Why should anybody work for you, 
except perhaps at extravagant compensation, when the government is willing and 
anxious to make him a landed proprietor himself practically without money and 
without price? 

Nor is it farm labor alone that is drawn from its natural home by the reckless- 
ness of Uncle Sam in giving everybody a farm. A class of people better off finan- 
cially go west also, and take their money with them, the class among whom the 
farmer looks for tenants if he wishes to let his property, for purchasers if he wishes 
to sell. Why should a man of some means hire your farm or buy it, if he can get 
one of his own for nothing, grow up with the country, and presently land in con- 
gress and go to passing irrigation bills? 

Now notice, please, how these three wrongs converge to drain the very lifeblood 
of the established farmer who has bought his farm and paid for it, or (still worse) 
owes something on it. The value of his crops is reduced by unfair and illegitimate 
competition; the supply of labor that he needs is minimized and therefore its price 
enhanced; and the class among whom he ought to be able to find tenants or pur- 
chasers is seriously restricted. The same malign influences act, of course, on all 
his brother farmers. Their profits, like his, are fearfully diminished, and many of 
them, like him, are offering their farms to anybody who will pay a decent rent or 
buy at a reasonable value. Thus an unnatural and intensely pernicious competition 
is set up, — set up by our own government, mind you, by giving away our own land 
— a competition not so much between the East and the West as between neighbors 
in the older states, for the disposal of their property. So of course the value shrinks; 
the farmer falls out of the rank in the social scale that he ought to hold, because 
his property has so little money value, for, say what you will, a man's standing in 

TO 



society is regulated very largely by his upposed financial means. And if he wishes 
to borrow money on his farm, he finds not oiily that it is valued far below what 
wmild be normally a reasonable sum, but also thai 1 oth to advi 

money on farm security at all, because the sail property is slow and uncer- 

tain. 

The American farmer oughl to be nol onl] the mo I indep ndent beii 
earth, hut one of the most envied. Of nil property in tin country, 
to he the most desired and the quickest in demand. There should be a do 
would-be purchasers or tenants bidding against each other for every farm that there 
is supposed to be a chance to get. The possession of a farm in the Unit( 
especially in the older settled regions, should be, and under normal conditions would 
be. like the possession of land in the environ; of a great and fast growing city, 
certain to enrich the owner, or at least his children, by natural and inevitable incn 
in value from the increasing demand of a multiplying population. Farm mortgi 
should be the most sought for of all investments,, and the interest should be reduced, 
by competition of lenders, to about half of what has now to be paid, while the 
amount that can easily be borrowed should be about twice what it is now. Every 
skillful farmer, operating a property of any reasonable dimensions, should not only 
be sure of a living but should be on the highway to wealth, or at least have before 
him every probability of acquiring very much more than an ample competence for 
his declining years. 

The difference between this condition of affairs — the normal, natural and proper 
condition for this preeminently agricultural country — and the condition that actu- 
ally prevails, is due, wholly and absolutely, to one single cause, the prolongation, 
far beyond the time of its usefulness, of the American passion for developing the 
country, and especially for developing its agriculture, while we ought to have been 
thinking, instead, of the financial returns to the individual agriculturist. In our 
mail passion for what is called development, for filling up the country with people, 
any and every sort of people, we have rashly undermined the column of financial 
prosperity for the common farmer, and have therefore endangered nol only his 
happiness but. the happiness of all. 

Nevertheless it might be thought, it long has been thought, that the immense 
evils of the perpetuation of our superannuated public land system were slowly work- 
ing out their own cure. The arable public land has been so recklessly wasted and 
worse than wasted, so forced upon an already fearfully overloaded market, that it 
is now nearly gone. I suppose it is within bounds to say that there hardly remains 
unappropriated a desirable homestead in any state washed by the Mississippi or it< 
affluents; and they are scarce anywhere. As the Year Book of the Department oi 
Agiiculture some years ago said: "All the best parts of the public domain have 
been appropriated, and comparatively very little good agricultural land remains open 
to settlement." It would seem that we are within sight of the beginning of tin- 
end of the mischief, and might hope now for a gradual improvement in the price 

n 



of farm property, the supply of wild land being nearly exhausted, while our popula- 
tion is increasing by leaps and bounds. This ray of hope is well-nigh extinguished 
by the spectre of national irrigation at the national expense, your expense and 
mine, which materialized into very solid form in the passage by the last congress 
of the bill appropriating an unknown number of millions of dollars, the proceeds 
of all future sales of the public lands, your property and mine, for the purpose of 
rendering fruitful by irrigation and then giving away I don't know how many hun- 
dreds of millions of acres of land now arid, thus postponing to the time of our 
great-grand-children or later the condition of affairs which shall create a sharp 
demand, with constantly rising prices, for agricultural land. Unless that bill be 
repealed, and similar projects defeated for years to come, we have before us only 
a second stage in the work of spoliation. And that is my objection to the whole 
irrigation scheme in all its protean forms, to any scheme for increasing the culti- 
vated area of the United States until such time as the land that has been bought and 
is cultivated by individual taxpayers shall come into such demand, by the growing 
requirements of our growing population, as to multiply very greatly its present 
money value. The whole irrigation project is a project to rob and impoverish the 
largest and most useful element of our American population, for the benefit of the 
handful of people in the newer states, most of these people themselves being, directly 
or indirectly, the beneficiaries of the government — that is to say, the beneficiaries 
of the American people — under the operation of that miserable old homestead law 
and similar out-of-date methods that we have thoughtlessly permitted to perpetuate 
themselves into a century for the circumstances and conditions of which they have 
no fitness whatsoever. We have turned, by our improper appropriation and reckless 
squandering, what ought to have been a priceless heritage for distant generations 
to come, into a veritable curse of our own times. In developing our agriculture, 
we are crushing our agriculturists. 

So much for the question of public policy involved in our management of the 
national domain. Now consider, please, the equities of the matter, the rights and 
the wrongs. This is no sort of a sectional plea, no setting up of one part of the 
country or one class of our people as entitled to any kind of special favor from 
the government, or special protection from competition. Not a bit of it; nothing 
like it. But as a great deal has been said about furnishing homes for the homeless, 
and a great many birds seem to have been caught with that chaff, let us notice just 
here the fundamental principles involved. In the first place, a farm is primarily a 
factory, only incidentally and accidentally a home; keep that distinction very clearly 
and sharply in mind, I pray you. Of course, the owner may live on the premises; 
so may the owner of a cotton mill. But in every respect in which the occupancy 
of new farms at the far West affects the interests of the present owners of the prop- 
erty out of which they are carved, the people of the United States, each new farm 
is to be considered entirely as a new factory, entering directly into competition with 
those now established. The irrigation scheme does not at all differ in essential 

12 



characteristics from a plan of inveigling the government into building and equipping 
thousands of new fact. I giving them to any impecunious but enterpri 

applicants who might come along. Think what our manufacturers now established 
in business would say to a project like that! If it would be grossly iniquitous and 
monstrous, as is of course evident, why is a similar project any better if it is food- 
stuffs that are to be manufactured instead of cloth or buttons, and if it is the farmers 
instead of the mill owners of the country that are to suffer? 

Please notice, secondly, that the wild lands are the property of all the people, 
just as much the property of the farmer in the northeast corner of Maine or the 
orange grower on the Florida peninsula as of those who live around them. 
According to the figures of the National Irrigation Association, about thirteen- 
fourteenths of all our population are east of the arid region, and the plan of this 
association and of those who act wita it is simply to deprive this enormous 
majority of all their ownership in the property referred to — property perfectly cer- 
tain to appreciate in selling value enormously after a generation or two — that it may 
be used, directly and actively, to the injury of the present owners, in the interest of 
what is called developing the country and benefiting the mere handful of people in 
the newer regions. If some of our western friends were owners of valuable lots in 
Boston which they preferred to keep vacant until a growing demand should bring 
an increase in their selling value, and the Bostonians living around these lots should 
endeavor to seize them, under color of developing Boston and pr ■ iding homes for 
the homeless, one can imagine the indignation of the owners anu „ne opinion they 
would express of the shameless rapacity of the plotters. Their own plan is pre- 
cisely the same, except for a difference in the location of the coveted booty. 

Permit me now to read to you what I think the best brief summary of the whole 
business that has yet appeared — a preamble and resolutions adopted without a dis- 
senting voice at the last annual meeting of the National Grange of Patrons of Hus- 
bandry, at Lewiston, Ale., eleven months ago. They run thus: 

" Whereas, the one great burden on the farming interests of the United States 
consists in the perpetuation of the superannuated policy of the government in giv- 
ing away its arable lands to anybody and everybody who will occupy them, thereby 
constantly maintaining and increasing a most unfair competition with farmers 
already established, and diverting to the far West thousands of men who would 
naturally furnish the much needed force of labor for farmers who have bought their 
lands and paid or agreed to pay for them; and 

" Whereas, this injury would be continued for many generations longer, should 
any project be adopted for bringing unto cultivable state the immense tracts of the 
public domain now arid; therefore be it 

"Resolved, That this body, representing in large measure the agricultural interests 
of the whole country, denounces all projects for irrigating any portion of the public 
domain at the public expense. 

" Resolved, That an authenticated copy of these resolutions be forwarded by 
registered mail to the President of the United States, with the request that he refer 

13 



to the matter in his message to the coming congress, and that he withhold executive 
approval from any bill intended to pave the way for government irrigation, should 
the advocates of such a measure succeed in securing its passage by the two houses." 

These resolutions, I repeat, were adopted unanimously at the last annual meeting 
of the National Grange of Patrons of Husbandry, an order that has pretty nearly 
a million members and is assuredly entitled, as far as is possible for any sort of 
organization that you can imagine, to speak for the farming population of the entire 
country, especially as twenty-five of the thirty states that have full organization were 
represented on that occasion by duly accredited delegates. One would really think- 
that their unanimous declaration, on a matter so clearly vital to their interest, the 
greatest interest by far of the United States, would have been treated at Washington 
with respectful consideration, to say the least of it. How it was treated, the country 
knows. 

One word in conclusion, to anticipate a possible reply. It is often said fry the 
far western party that we a.t the east don't know much about irrigation anyhow, 
and that if we would study it at the west we should become ardent converts. Well, 
I have myself examined the workings of the process in, I believe, almost every state 
and territory in which it has been put into operation. No man can describe the 
possibilities of production of the arid lands under irrigation in terms so strong that 
I will not believe him. The point is, not at all that we Easterners do not know 
what irrigation will do. We know too well. If the government is going into that 
business, we can point out thousands of farms east of the Mississippi where we 
should like to see it tried, and tens of thousands of farms east of the Mississippi 
where we should like to see the government apply the correlative of irrigation, tile 
drainage, at the public expense, if the government is to go into such operations 
at all. Do not take that statement as a joke. There is no doubt whatever that the 
expenditure east of the 98th meridian (which is the eastern boundary of arid America, 
according to the Irrigation Association) of the millions of dollars proposed to be 
used west of that line, in irrigating and draining farms already in operation, would 
increase their product by a larger volume than will be raised west of it, for genera- 
tions to come, under the irrigation scheme, while enormously enhancing their value 
and the prosperity of the owners, and therefore of the nation at large, instead of 
setting up, at public expense, dangerous and illegitimate competition. An individual 
owner is very foolish indeed to add to his holdings while he does not half cultivate 
half of what he now pretends to crop. Why does not the same principle exactly 
apply to a nation? 

As for the arid public lands, the greater the possibilities of irrigation, the greater 
the evil of doing it, at the present stage of our history, at the public cost. If we 
could lock them all up and forget their existence for a century to come, the greatest 
industry of America, and therefore the greatest interest of the greatest number of 
Americans, would have a far brighter future before it than now presents itself to 
the farmer of the present day and his sons and grandsons, who should have every 
inducement possible to follow in his footsteps. 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

14 




003 189 212 



The Menace of 'the Arid Lands 



AN ADDRESS 



BEFORE THE 



Farmers' National Congress 



AT 



Macon, Ga., Oct. 9th, 1902. 

By GILBERT M. TUCKER, 

Editor of the Country Gentleman, 

Albany, N. Y. 



Compliments of 

The De Laval Separator Co, 



/ 



fo. OVoJuvol* 



The Menace of the Arid Lands 



COMPLIMENTS OF 

The De Laval Separator Co. 



LIBRARY OF CONCRESS 



-"""""«■ ma mm III 

003 189 212 



Hollinger Corp. 



